A dense and often exciting account, written in leisurely and mannered prose.
An exhaustive account of the fires of 1910, which destroyed millions of acres in four northwestern states and transformed American conceptions of forest maintenance and fire control.
Pyne (How the Canyon Became Grand, 1998, etc.) reminds us of just how destructive fire was in everyday life 100 years ago. Most building materials were highly inflammable, for example, and forests and prairies were often cleared by means of (intentionally set) fires. Mass transportation (e.g., the railway) was fueled by fire, and even public entertainments and spectacles generally revolved around bonfires, campfires, or some other form of fireworks. Reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt advocated new notions of conservation in combating forest fires, but progress was derailed by bureaucratic scandals and infighting (particularly between the Geological Survey and the newly formed Forest Service). In the style of academic thriller, Pyne narrates a monthly chronology of events that led up to the “Big Blowup” of August 1910—a rapid series of firestorms across mountainous Montana terrain that claimed more than 80 lives and led to the organized enforcement of fire controls. The author makes good use of many eyewitness accounts, and he emphasizes the Forest Service’s strange situation: They essentially invented wilderness firefighting on the fly, using controversial tactics like backfiring (beginning a controlled burn to consume potential fuels). Unfortunately, they were not equal to the magnitude of the catastrophe before them, and they did little that actually succeeded in extinguishing the fires (which burnt themselves out over a course of several weeks).
A dense and often exciting account, written in leisurely and mannered prose.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89990-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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